ABSTRACT
Singing is a physical activity. Singers move breath over the larynx and shape the resulting sound into consonants and vowels with their tongue, teeth, and lips. Singers do something bodily, but they also do something that is subject to a variety of collective expectations and takes place within specific shared contexts. They may also improvise new lyrics for an existing song, and singers in jazz tradition may compose lyrics for an instrumental melodic line or improvise nonsense syllables in the course of a song performance. The fact that singers in a number of traditions have the latitude to alter lyrics would seem to indicate that conveying the nuances of a particular text in a fixed order is not necessary, at least not in those traditions. Like an actor, a singer may inhabit a role. This seems obviously true of singers in opera and other forms of musical drama, and also true of at least some other kinds of songs.
